Among the most memorable words Karl Marx ever wrote — up there
with “A specter is haunting Europe” and “Workers of the world unite” — are
these, on the advantages of the world that communist revolution would bring
about: “Communist society,” he predicted, would enable “me to do one thing
today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”

This is from “The German ideology,” published posthumously
but written by Marx in his twenties. The image of freedom expressed is an
unmistakably youthful one, conveying more about recreation than vocation, and
providing no remotely plausible basis for any society, revolutionary or not. If
cattle rearing occurred only in the evening, there’d be neither beef nor dairy.
If hunters and fishers were active only when the mood took them, we’d all be
vegans, except that vegans would starve, too, since what Marx said about
hunting and fishing was meant to apply just as strictly to farming, nut
gathering, and apple picking.

This utopia of an early Marx consists of aristocratic
pastimes, diversions, games. It is a vision of a global human retirement
community, of our species relaxing after the terrible toil of history. If such
idyllic circumstances could be achieved, what would the critic find to
“criticize after dinner”?

Marx himself was not big on pastimes and played no games
that we know of except one, chess, complaining furiously when he lost, which
was often. Still, it is a noteworthy footnote to the history of the Left that
the Communist Manifesto was cooked up, in the 1840s, at Paris’s Cafe de la
Regence, Europe’s storied chess venue. This is the setting Diderot described in
“Rameau’s Nephew” and Samuel Beckett alluded to in “Murphy”; it is where
Rousseau and other philosophes hammered out the intellectual framework for the
French Revolution, while declaring that the unsung pawn was no less than the
heart and soul of chess.

As Tristram Hunt establishes in “Marx’s General”, it was
Engels who came closer than Marx, his lifetime comrade and collaborator, to
realizing a life of “one thing today and another tomorrow”, though not without,
as a dialectician would have to stipulate, a good deal of contradiction. While
living in Manchester, where he managed the English branch of his father’s
textile business, Engels owned a horse and was in good standing at “some of
England’s most hunt-friendly settings,” leading the chase after foxes and hares
at the head of England’s “most elevated nobility.”

Engels complained that his efforts to conform to the mores
of the English gentry left him little time for revolutionary thought and
practice. He complained, no less, that all the concerts and balls he was
obliged to attend kept him from applying his “acknowledged gift” for mixing up
lobster salad, which, “*quelle horreur*” had become “quite rusty.”

Engels lived a more various existence than Marx, more upper
crust and more lower class. While Marx sat on his butt at the British Museum,
grinding out “Das Kapital”, and acquiring chronic butt complaints, such as
hemorrhoids, Engels, in addition to running a factory and running down foxes,
ran after working class women. One of them, Lizzy, with whom he later settled
down, and on her deathbed married, was his prized informant about working class
life — as Engels, in many ways, was Marx’s.

When discussing Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram
Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from
a damning portrayal. Hunt sees him as the more fully human of the two original
Marxists, and of renewed relevance today. “From his aerie in the Manchester
cotton industry,” Hunt writes, “Engels understood as few other socialists did
the true face of rampant capitalism. . . . And the recent events in the world’s
stock markets and banking sector have brought Engels’s critique into sharper
focus.”

But there are substantial weaknesses in Hunt’s account. Hunt
does a fair job of describing the various intellectual disciplines that were
fused into Marxism. There was, above all, the Hegelian dialectic, Germany’s
seminal contribution to Marxism. That was joined with the tradition of French
revolutionary activism, and with English analyses of economics.

But Hunt never steps back to contemplate the inherent
problem of such grand syntheses when bought to bear on human life. To seek a
unified field theory in physics is one thing. If found, it would not lead to
gulags or concentration camps, the way ersatz unified field theories of human
activity seem always to do.

Hunt writes: “Was Engels responsible for the terrible
misdeeds carried out under the banner of Marxism-Leninism?. . . the answer has
to be no. In no intelligible sense can Engels or Marx bear culpability for the
crimes of historical actors carried out generations alter, even if the policies
were offered up in their honor.”

But throughout this biography, Hunt himself seems divided on
this issue. He writes, for instance, about one purge of communist ranks carried
out by Marx and Engels: “What the next 150 years brought in terms of
expulsions, denunciations, and political purges within left-wing parties is
grimly foreshadowed” in this instance. There are many examples of such
foreshadowing.

Marx once dreamed about a world that allowed for going from
“one thing today and another tomorrow.” The intellectual weaponry he and Engels
forged for their successors led, contra their youthful hopes, to the opposite.